Splatoon 2 devs reveal more about Salmon Run co-op mode

During the Nintendo E3 presentation, Nintendo Treehouse members sat down with members of the Splatoon 2 development team to give us a sneak peek at the game’s new co-op mode called Salmon Run. The mode was revealed to be quite hard just from the sneak peek of gameplay we got and now a new interview sheds some light on the reasoning behind that.

If you missed it, be sure to check out this preview of Salmon Run from E3.

Apparently, Salmon Run was designed specifically with the Nintendo Switch in mind. In a recent interview, Splatoon developer Hisashi Nogami was asked if this game mode was prototyped for the original game.

In our development of the original game, once we had established the multiplayer concept we wanted to do, we knew that we wanted to have a single-player experience as well. This ended up becoming the campaign that you’ve played, but that was actually just one idea that was among all these experiments that we did. Another one of those experiments was a single-player experience where the goal was to defend something from oncoming waves of enemies. So, while that original single-player defense experiment didn’t survive first game’s single-player campaign, we can still see elements of it, reimagined as a co-op experience, in Salmon Run.

The interviewer notes how hard Salmon Run was upon trying it on the E3 show floor and asked the devs if this was intentional. They both answer yes and give their reasons why this new game mode is so hard.

So far, we’ve only shown Salmon Run as a local multiplayer thing. One thing we’re hoping for is that it will really attract players with some experience with Splatoon multiplayer, and that they’ll be able to team up and offer advice. Communication will be really important in that local setting for players to inform each other about what’s going on and share things that they’ve learned from multiplayer.

In the full version of the game there is an online version of Salmon Run mode but you’ll need to raise your multiplayer level to level 4 before being able to participate in that.

So it sounds like the horde mode will require you to get good at Splatoon 2 before you can participate online, which should limit the number of inexperienced players jumping into this mode and bringing the team down.

Overall, it looks pretty interesting and definitely gives the game more staying power for those who like multiplayer games but would like different modes for Splatoon 2. What do you think of Salmon Run mode? Are you excited to check it out when the game releases on July 21st?